Photo-Sharing Service Twitpic Is Shutting Down And Blaming Twitter (TWTR)

Karyne Levy, provided by

Published 2:10 pm, Thursday, September 4, 2014

Photo-sharing site Twitpic announced today that it's shutting down on Sept. 25.

Twitpic allowed you to share photos on Twitter long before you were natively allowed to do so from within Twitter.

The company cites a trademark dispute with Twitter as the reason it's shutting its doors.

In a blog post, Twitpic founder Noah Everett writes that Twitter threatened to cut off access to its developer tools:

A few weeks ago Twitter contacted our legal demanding that we abandon our trademark application or risk losing access to their API. This came as a shock to us since Twitpic has been around since early 2008, and our trademark application has been in the USPTO since 2009.

Rather than fight the company, the post reads, Everett decided to shut Twitpic down. That means that all the old tweets that include Twitpic pictures will have dead links.

And that includes animated GIFs. Twitpic is currently one of the only ways to tweet out the file format on popular Twitter feed readers like TweetDeck.

Twitpic will offer a way to download photos and videos that remain on the site within the next few days.

Twitter says that the move is an effort to protect its brand, rather than not allowing the third-party service to exist at all.

"We're sad to see Twitpic is shutting down," a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider. "We encourage developers to build on top of the Twitter service, as Twitpic has done for years, and we made it clear that they could operate using the Twitpic name. Of course, we also have to protect our brand, and that includes trademarks tied to the brand."

But if Twitter says that Twitpic could still operate using the Twitpic name, then it's still unclear what the trademark dispute is about. We've reached out to Twitter to clarify, and will update this post when we hear back.